Uighurs Beleaguered

Asia tries a different approach to the problem that is Islam.

The United States is far from the only nation that has problems with
misbehaving Muslims. The Madrid train and Bali nightclub
bombers, the Mumbai and Bombay attackers, and the Achille Lauro cruise
ship
hijackers were Muslims - to but scratch the surface.

These problems, as infuriating as they are and as devastating to those
involved in them, seem minor compared to the problems Muslims impose on
the Soviet Union and on China. Consider
the Second
Chechen War:

On 9 August 1999, Islamist fighters from Chechnya infiltrated
Russia's
Dagestan region, declaring it an independent state and calling for a
jihad until "all unbelievers had been driven out". On 1 October,
Russian troops entered Chechnya. The campaign ended the de
facto independence of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and restored
Russian federal control over the territory. ...

The exact death toll from this conflict is unknown. Unofficial
sources
estimate a range from 25,000 to 50,000 dead or missing, mostly
civilians in Chechnya. Russian casualties are over 5,200 (official
Russian casualty figures) and are about 11,000 according to the
Committee of Soldiers' Mothers.

We lost perhaps 2,996 people during the 9/11 attacks. That's a
bit over half the official Russian figure for the Chechen war and far
less than the
unofficial, but reasonably credible figure of 11,000 which comes from
polling soldiers' relatives.

Mr. Putin, the President of Russia, got his start in public life as
head of the KGB, much as President Bush I got his start as head of our
CIA.
Mr. Putin's major claim to fame was earned by his handling their "spot
of bother in Chechnya." He is well aware of the
potential
of Islam both to cause great trouble and to serve as a useful
enemy which can be used as an argument for cooperating with the
government's efforts to protect citizens from attack.

President Putin's approach to the dangers of Islam may be brisk by
Western standards, but at least it isn't ludicrous.
Knife-wielding savages whose motivations could not
be discerned despite their shouts of "Allah!" recently murdered enough
Londoners that London Mayor Sadiq
Khan... announced a
crackdown on knives:

"No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife," Khan
tweeted. "Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full
force of the law."

No doubt it is but a coincidence that Mayor Khan is, himself, a
Muslim.

The Yellow Man's Burden

Having spent the last few thousand years fighting off occasional
barbarian hordes
from the North and building the Great Wall to help keep them out, the
Chinese are well aware of the negative
potential of large foreign populations with incompatible beliefs -
and, in Xinjiang in far northwestern China, they have just such a
Muslim
population.

Chinese officials agree with Mayor Khan about the necessity of
restricting access to
knives in areas which, like London, have significant Muslim
populations. By law, butcher knives and cleavers in restaurants
and butcher shops in such high-risk areas
must be
chained to the wall to discourage forbidden
use. Smaller kitchen
knives remain portable, but they must have the purchaser's ID burned into a QR code so they
can be traced if necessary.

Being somewhat more accustomed to long-term thinking than Western
politicians whose planning rarely extends beyond the next election,
the Chinese have recently begun taking active measures to minimize the
long-term Muslim
threat to public order. Reuters reports:

A United Nations panel has accused China of turning its far-flung
western region of Xinjiang "into something that resembled a massive
internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a 'no rights zone'." It estimates
that there could be as many as one million Muslims who have been
detained there. ...

Most of those who have been rounded up by the security forces are
Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority that numbers some 10
million. Muslims from other ethnic groups, including Kazakhs, have
also been detained.

China rejects the increasing chorus of accusation of abusing Muslims:

The facilities, it says, are vocational training centers that
emphasize "rehabilitation and redemption" and are part of its efforts
to combat terrorism and religious
extremism. [emphasis added]

Despite appearances and the lessons of history, these camps don't seem
to be specifically a reaction either to the Chinese
history of suffering invasion or from knowing about other nations'
difficulties with Islam. Instead, they seem to be a direct
response to recent events in
China itself:

They [Uighurs] have faced periodic crackdowns, which intensified
after
riots in the regional capital in Urumqi in 2009 killed nearly 200
people. [emphasis added] ...

Bombings in Xinjiang and attacks allegedly carried out by Uighur
separatists, including a mass stabbing in the city of Kunming in
China's southwest in 2014 that killed 31 people, led to further
restrictions. In recent years, under Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party
secretary in Xinjiang and a loyalist of President Xi Jinping, measures
against Uighurs have included a ban on "abnormal" beards for men and
restrictions on religious pilgrimages to Mecca.

The Chinese don't want potential jihadis going abroad to be
radicalized. They aren't particularly concerned about Western
criticism
of what their critics call "concentration camps" and they call
"re-education centers." They describe calls to close
their detention centers as "not factual" and "politically driven."

"If you do not say it's the best way, maybe it's the necessary way
to
deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has
failed
in doing so," said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the
Bureau
of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information
Office. [emphasis added]

In at least half their opinion, the Chinese are not alone: the New
York Timesreports that Hillary seems to agree
with the Chinese view that "the West has failed in doing so".

Europe's leaders need to send a much stronger message that they
will
no longer offer "refuge and support" to migrants if they want to curb
the right-wing populism spreading across the Continent, Hillary
Clinton warned in an interview published Thursday.

"I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were
taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is
fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear
message - 'we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and
support' - because if we don't deal with the migration issue it will
continue to roil the body politic," she said.

Hillary's statement that immigration issues will "continue to roil the
body politic" is a bit of an understatement given the reaction to
thousands of illegals camped in Tijuana awaiting a chance to storm
across our border.
At a minimum,
Hillary is
saying that refugee intake should be dramatically reduced and that
some
should be sent back. Unlike the Chinese, however, her reason for
limiting immigration is purely pragmatic, because admitting refugees
makes voters
unhappy and less inclined to vote for Democrats. She doesn't appear to
see anything inherently wrong, dangerous, or unwise with sharing a
national homeland with a large Muslim population. The Chinese do.

The Chinese situation is a bit different because they aren't able to
handle their problems by reducing Muslim inflow, as Europe partially
could and the United States certainly can. Their Uighurs
were born
in
territory which China regards as part of China. They can't export
them anywhere and they know that the Uighurs won't accept Chinese
laws or customs; all they can do is lock 'em up.

They can get away with that in their no-nonsense dictatorship,
but is this really a sustainable solution for ever and ever? It's
not, which is why the Chinese are trying an approach never before tried
with Islam: The goal is to entirely and permanently eliminate all
vestiges of Muslim belief and
practice by directly taking over the next generation.

A Final Solution, Without the Bloodshed

The Independentreports that children of detainees are being
placed in orphanages even if the parents aren't, strictly speaking,
dead:

"It's like my kids are in jail," Meripet said, her voice cracking.
"My
four children are separated from me and living like orphans." ...

"You have ethnic identity, Uighur identity in particular, being
singled out as this kind of pathology." [emphasis added]

The Chinese know quite well that persuading adult Muslims to stop
talking
about Islam
in public, even if this could be effectively accomplished, is not a
long-term solution if the parents are able to pass
their ideas
on to their children.

Separating children from their parents to
keep them from learning their parents' customs and languages has
been tried
many times in the past. American Indian, Canadian "indigenous
tribes" and
Australian aborigines were all subject to having children removed from
their parents and put in government-run schools to civilize them.

This
didn't work out very well, but then, the United States, Canada, and
Australia were all Western democracies which, while imperfect, liked to
view themselves as believing in the concept of universal human
rights. Their citizens were soon sickened by the inhumanity of
separating children from their natural parents; the various Lost
Generations didn't stay lost for long enough to totally lose
their native heritage. The Chinese, suffering under no such
ethical restrictions, may be
able to be more effective by virtue of being more thorough and
coldbloodedly determined.

Have the Chinese found the secret
sauce to
eliminate undesirable pathologies in one generation? It seems
logical: if all children of Muslims are removed from their
parents and brought up in non-Muslim households, Chinese
Islam will die out in due time when the last Mohammad keels over
from old age.

While this approach would rightly make any Westerner blanch, the
various liberal groups which are criticizing the Chinese approach
to containing Islam should look on the bright
side. By their own standards, the Chinese are being quite
restrained in dealing with their Muslim problem.

They aren't using the solution the Egyptians decreed to solve the
problem of their rapidly-increasing population of Hebrew slaves.
The Book of Genesis tells us that Pharaoh ordered the midwives to kill
all male babies as soon as they were born. The midwives
wouldn't do it, and the population kept increasing. Pharaoh's
daughter tried the Chinese solution by taking the infant Moses into her
home to raise him in an atmosphere of Egyptian values.

This attempt at cultural assimilation failed. Moses
reverted to Hebrew values when he grew up, murdered an Egyptian, and
fled for his life. After spending 40 years having his
consciousness raised while keeping sheep on the back of beyond, he
returned to Egypt and fomented a rebellion which resulted in the
Egyptians driving the Hebrews out of the country. What if the
Chinese government shipped all the Uighurs over the border into Siberia
and sealed up the Great Wall behind them?

Here's another alternative: the Chinese could fit Muslim
women with IUDs to enforce a zero-child policy. This isn't
that much of a step beyond the one-child policy China spent decades
brutally enforcing on its own people, through forced abortions,
infanticide, and prison for those pregnant without
permission. This seemingly-obvious approach would
bring about the desired result significantly faster,
but for reasons unclear, the Chinese aren't choosing to do that either.

Their actual policy is tangible evidence that the Chinese are
attempting a
minimalist solution: it would cost the Chinese government vastly less
to adopt the Genghis Khan approach to dealing with culture clash.
They could simply wipe
out
the Uighurs and be done with them. Having killed more
than 80 million Chinese during Mao's
reign,
getting rid of 10 million Uighurs would be simple by comparison and
might also send a message to dissident Tibetans and Hong Kongers.

It's somewhat surprising that the modern Communist Chinese government
has chosen not to take
any of these paths. They have adopted a kindler, gentler approach
despite having practiced mass murder within
living memory. Can
it be that the Communist Party is developing a conscience? Or,
perhaps, that the Chinese people are developing the first small drip of
a bleeding heart?

This raises another startling question: two hundred years ago,
Western cultures were far more willing to repress annoying minorities
by any means necessary but they backed off. Will China retain its
hard heart long
enough to get the job done? Or will public opinion, domestic or
international, cause them to stop? The Economistreported that "at least 14 ambassadors from
Western
countries, led by Canada, have come together to confront China over its
mass detentions of Muslims in the far-western region of Xinjiang, most
of them ethnic Uighurs" - how much do they, or we, care, and how much
does it matter?

Just before the 2016 election, Hillary made her opposition to the
Christian
way of life much more explicit and much more threatening than she ever
had
before.
Even the
Washington Postregarded her ideas
as a looming threat to religious liberty:

Speaking to the 2015 Women in the World Summit, Clinton
declared
that "deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural
biases have to be changed."

Religious beliefs have to be changed? This is perhaps the
most
radical statement against religious liberty ever uttered by someone
seeking the presidency.

Hillary didn't say "have to change," she said
"have to be changed." By definition, this
means
using force
against people
who refuse to change their beliefs in favor of government-approved
views.

We're sure the Chinese government would not only approve, they'd be
happy to sell her the very latest in facial recognition, fingerprint
apps, behavior analysis algorithms, and all the trappings of a
high-tech surveillance state.
Maybe the far-left Amazon tech snowflakes, protesting against their employer's sales of
surveillance software to Western governments, aren't thinking things
through realistically?

To revert to reality, however, just what do we do with Islam? There
are roughly a billion Muslims worldwide. Polls
say that around a third of Muslims won't even condemn the 9-11 attacks;
roughly the same do not oppose suicide bombings.

Geographic distances, which helped defend Europe from Muslim
invasion from both ends during the Middle Ages, are of no use
now.
European Muslims who don't care to assimilate can be radicalized via
the Internet and their
lone-wolf attacks are very hard to stop. Although the Mayor of
London has banned carrying knives, nobody is talking about banning
trucks even though one man with a truck can kill a lot more people than one man with a knife.

Very interesting article, until one reaches the final, one sentence paragraph: “...what can the world do about Islam?”I expect that “Hobbes” is not a big fan of the U.N., and for good reason: “The World” really can’t do much about anything, which is why, Thank God, we don’t have a successful world government. Instead, we have the costly thing called the U.N. and the frightening specter of some of the world’s worst offenders getting seats on the “Human Rights” committee of the U.N.The Chinese have chosen a certain route to solving their problem. That route won’t work in a Constitutional Democracy such as our own.Instead, we have found new citizens by assimilating newcomers from other cultures and turning them into English-speaking Americans. There is a serious question as to whether our Muslim population is amenable to this method, though it may well be, providing we don’t let very many of them in. It takes a long to time to secularise the kids, intermarry them and get them out of Mosques.A bigger problem is Latino immigration. So many of them disrespect our laws and borders that they now form internal ghettos, with their own Spanish radio ads, their own TV channels, and the demand for their own ballots.We could take a step in the right direction by making English the official language, and forbid printing legal papers, ballots and road signs in any language other than English. And of course, many other people now want. THEIR language (Vietnamese, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, and on and on) used on ballots. Greatly reduced immigration, with legal limits and an impregnable border is the only solution. Sadly, the Democrat party is so diseased by Leftism that it will fight any reasonable solution.

December 10, 2018 9:41 AM

Mark Johnson said:

Is there any room for"live and let live", or do we have to submit to some version of Big Brother to protect us?

December 12, 2018 2:58 PM

Nate said:

@Mark Johnson - it would appear that there is no room for tolerance of any kind.

If you think the transgender movement is confined to college campuses and social justice warriors on Twitter, I have bad news for you. A high school French teacher in Virginia was fired last week by the West Point Public School Board for refusing to use a transgender student’s new pronoun.

News of the firing comes nearly a month after a school district in Florida punished a male P.E. teacher for refusing to supervise a self-described transgender girl who was granted access to the boys’ locker room under a new transgender policy.

In the Virginia case, the school board took things a step further, firing a teacher who didn’t violate a specific policy but simply refused a demand from a transgender student. The teacher, Peter Vlaming, is a married father of four and by all accounts well-liked by his students. About 100 students staged a walkout last week to protest his firing from West Point High School, where he taught for the past seven years.

Far from being cruel and disrespectful to the student in question—a biological girl who is posing as male—Vlaming met with her and her parents and offered to use the girl’s new name in class and avoid feminine pronouns. But he was not willing to say “he” or “him” when referring to the student in conversations with others, citing his Christian faith as the reason.

And much more.

December 12, 2018 5:49 PM

James Ransom said:

Once the teachers of character are all fired, just think what will be left: cringing cowards just putting in time to get their pensions, and some far leftists who encourage such behavior.And where are the parents of the majority of the students (assuming there is a majority resenting this kind of school board behavior)? Why are they not attending Board meetings, running for Board positions, and otherwise raising a stink?Now the kids in school will be brainwashed into thinking this is "normal behavior" or their parents may find private schools for them--if there are any--where "transgender" (sic) students are the ones who get kicked out.

December 13, 2018 4:41 PM

John Kerr said:

Multiculturalism has never worked in a single country for long. The Soviet Union, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia are just a few examples of the clash between cultures that ended badly for each and everyone of these countries. This is not arguable no matter how you want to spin it. It is not a matter of the best intentions, humanitarian or otherwise. It is simply human nature. Unless a nation has a common language, common traditions and common national interests, the tug of war between the competing factions will ultimately tear the country apart. The United States in now experiencing the beginning of those competing cultural divisions. Immigration in and of itself does not have to be the problem but allowing people to immigrate into this country, by necessity has to be by our choice and by our laws. We have every right as a sovereign country to control our borders and make decisions based on our own interests.

A realistic immigration policy has to consider what is best for this country, first and foremost. It is no different than deciding who you allow to enter into your home. Compassion should always be in the equation but to allow a stranger into your home that refuses or is unable to understand your rules, you have every right to refuse entry of that person into your sacred space. Unless we can be assured that immigrants are willing to follow our rules, embrace our form of representative government and respect our traditions and values, then we owe it to ourselves and our children to secure that door. Race has little to do with these qualifications. Culture does. Culture doesn't have to be race based. The United States of America has done (and not without great struggle) the best job of welcoming people of different ethnicities into our country with the expectations of assimilation and integration into the dominant culture. Immigrants should only be welcomed if and when their desire is to be fully American, including the ability to converse in our common language and accepting our values and traditions. History has proven our case. Unregulated immigration is national suicide. Human nature will not change just because we want it to. Either deal with the facts or contribute to the destruction of our Republic. Multiculturalism has never worked and it won't work this time either.

December 17, 2018 11:07 PM

Leo said:

Divided we fall

December 18, 2018 12:35 PM

Joan Schaller Bauer said:

John Kerr, very well said, sir! Thanks!

December 19, 2018 6:29 PM

Mr. Reason said:

Christians have killed FAR more than Muslims. Fat Man and Little Boy were Christian war tools, so you need to read up on history because Christians (particularly English speaking Christians) have killed more people than anyone on Earth.

December 27, 2018 3:11 PM

Hans J Bauer said:

Mr. Reason should go $#%^& himself! Thanks!

December 27, 2018 11:53 PM

Nate said:

@Mr reason - would you regard the Nazis as Christians? What about Stalin and Mao? Communism was officially atheistic, so you can't fairly chalk the 100 million or so that these two tyrants killed up to Christians.

December 31, 2018 11:53 PM

Nate said:

China's treatment of their Muslims is beginning to be noticed and debated.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/china-xinjiang-crackdown/

It appears that all that lovely belt and road money is rather more important than mere concentration camps or whatever they are:

Mushahid Hussain, chairman of Pakistan’s Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, said the cardinal principle of Pakistan-China relations is to refrain from commenting on anything to do with another other country’s domestic issues – even though some 200 small Pakistani businessmen have been campaigning for the release of their Uyghur spouses from Chinese camps, or for the lifting of travel bans on their children, or for permission to visit them.

“Given the relationship of Pakistan with China, and in the Muslim world in particular, the Chinese narrative is apparently being accepted across the board as the one that is correct,” Hussain told Associated Press.

Turkey, too, despite its ethnic and cultural links to China’s Turkic Muslims and past support for Uyghur aspirations, has adopted a similar attitude as Chinese investment and financial aid expands.

With the exception of a few protests in Bangladesh and India and critical statements by Malaysian leaders, Muslims across the globe have largely refrained from pressuring their governments to speak out about developments in Xinjiang. In fact, China retains its status as Asia’s top tourism destination for Muslim travelers.

Nabeel Shariff, founder of UK-based halal holiday company Serendipity Tailormade, struggled with the ethical aspects of promoting Muslim tourism to China, but concluded that “In a way, it makes sure the Uyghur community are not forgotten.”

Shariff’s justification notwithstanding, there is little evidence that the plight of China’s Turkic Muslims remains in the Muslim public eye. Muslim and Chinese leaders appear to be betting that the silence is sustainable. That threatens to be a risky strategy.

For one thing, the crackdown in Xinjiang is expanding to the Hui, China’s non-Turkic Muslims. The autonomous region of Ningxia Hui recently signed a cooperation agreement on anti-terrorism with Xinjiang in a bid to learn from the crackdown on the Turkic Muslims, or, in the words of the Global Times, a Communist Party organ, “to learn from Xinjiang’s experiences in promoting social stability.”

January 8, 2019 11:01 AM

b.a. freeman said:

i had not known that the PRC was taking children from their muslim parents. i have seen this solution proposed by commenters on other forums (fora?), however, and it's pretty obvious when one thinks about the problem. yes, it is a cruel solution, since even the mothers of the ummah must (perhaps?) love their children (the fathers have been taught that their children are property, and many, if not most, muslim men appear to subscribe to that, in one degree or another), but in perhaps just 70 years, there will be no muslim citizens of china.

OTOH, look at this from another perspective. in order to completely wipe out the disease of islam, one must occupy the muslim region for centuries, make islam totally illegal, and relentlessly punish those who insist on practicing islam, in *any* form, for eternity. china is very familiar with having the central government fail (viz. the confucian cycle!), so they may not want to take the chance of encumbering future generations of chinese with incessant attacks by pious muslims because the government has weakened. islam is a mind disease, one which lacks appeal even to most hard-core leftists, who are willing to use it as a tool (proxy army of the pious to force collapse of western republics), but who still despise it as a stupid religion. like leprosy, the best way to avoid infection is to avoid long-term exposure (without precautions; this is an analogy, and is not meant to be a denigration of people afflicted by hansen's disease); remove the children before the infection has occurred, and they likely will remain (or become) civilized (or as civilized as a commie dictatorship can be). resolution will be achieved in a generation or 2.

if one is running a dictatorship with a documented history of mass murder, this seems like a really innocuous solution, even if repellent to western suckers. in all likelihood, though, they're taking this approach rather than going all genghis on the uighurs in order to preserve the chinese reputation as "progressive" with western leftists, whom they will no doubt need to fool at some point in the future. killing 2 birds with 1 stone, don'cha know!

February 5, 2019 10:57 AM

Patience said:

This seems like a very elegant solution to a centuries-long deadly problem.My worry is that this kind of solution doesn't have the good track record you might expect. You can take away a kid as an infant and raise him as something else, but if he ever finds out the truth later on, the results can be explosive - ref Moses.More recently, this was tried with aboriginal children in both Australia and the United States, and didn't end well in either place.